To a deeper understanding

The saying ‘when you’re ready, the teacher appears’ has never been more true for me at this juncture of my life. Internally, something has shifted, and it became readily obvious to me only a few months ago. Something shifted internally. My energy is different, and changing. The best way I can describe it, is that the anxious ruminating – constantly internally talking (thinking) and fixating on either what has happened, or what needs to happen in the future, has stopped. This is not something I’ve consciously made a decision to do – it has spontaneously stopped.

I have now been walking nearly daily in nature for over 4 years – since I started with ADF. I can now feel my breathing, and how my body moves, and how the air tastes, and the amazing wildlife even in such a seemingly barren place is just overflowing and obvious to me. When I walk now, I feel my muscles move, my breathing, I glory in the physical sensations of heat and air and noise and movement, instead of anxiously fixating and dissociating. I can stay in what I refer to mentally as ‘absolute reality’.

When I was a kid in math class, I learned about ‘absolute value’. |3| = 3; |-3| = 3; three is three, positive or negative. If you graph a 3, it’s certainly different than a -3. But, in absolute value, they’re the same. There’s only positive integers. I liken my focus on the physical world around me as ‘absolute reality’. To me, at that time, only the physical world with my 5 senses exist – all worlds are the same – everything is One. No Upper, Lower, Middle Worlds. No physical vs. spirit. It’s just all – THERE.

Enter Martha Beck. She wrote a new book, and in it she speaks of magic – and although she may not realize it, she really is talking about Magick – and her secular descriptions of accessing Oneness and the Eternal Now are spot on. In fact, she couches it in terms that made me finally realize what is meant by some of the poetic nonsense out there.

Here’s a for instance: I never understood what ‘live in the now’ meant. Those were just meaningless words to me, like trying to explain color to a blind person who had never seen the physical world. What does that really mean? Well, if someone had said to me ‘shut off the mind chatter, stop endlessly verbally thinking, and start looking at things without thinking about them – just SEE them – don’t describe them verbally in your mind, just SEE them as they are in that moment, then I would have understood.

This is the same problem I had as a child when people told me ‘just stand up for yourself’. What does that mean? What actions, thoughts, body language and verbalizing accompany ‘standing up for myself’? I needed to know those things, not the nebulous and confusing ‘stand up for yourself’. The issue seemed to be, folks think they’re being clear and what they’re saying has some sort of universal meaning understood by all, so if I wasn’t ‘standing up for myself’, it was a choice I was making and I would understand what they meant when they gave me that advice. But… I was not taught those skillsets growing up; in fact, it was actively squelched when I was a very small child, so I had no frame of reference, or permission, nor any skillsets to ‘stand up for myself’. It was a giant disconnect between what others assumed I knew, and what my actual abilities and knowledge were.

This is why I love this new book. Beck talks about things like dropping in to Oneness and Stillness, but she doesn’t give these nebulous frou-frou words that are totally meaningless; she actually describes HOW. How it feels in the body, the activities she engaged in to achieve it, what she was thinking, feeling, experiencing and verbalizing (or not, as the case may be). The timing seems really right for me to deepen my path, and she is a wonderful guide for me at this time.

Tapadh leibh!!!!

Citation for reference:
Beck, Martha Nibley. Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want. New York: Free, 2012. Print.